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Woodworking and Furniture-Making History
Ancient woodworking in Egypt, Greece, and Rome remains recognizable and understandable to the modern eye in both the techniques and materials used. It may be said that
in some areas of furniture making and design things have changed little from antiquity. Woodworking is OLD.
While straw, the typical material of very primitive furniture was used in ancient times, wood was
the commonly used material for framing and furniture making.
Ancient Egyptian woodworkers and furniture craftsman, as well as their Greek and Roman counterparts, employed many different kinds of wood
including: acacia, fig, almond, date palm, tamarisk, willow, and poplar trees and also exotic timber like cedar, ash, beech, oak, yew, elm, and cypress.
While ancient wooden furniture and crafts have
decayed and perished, to this day there exists in fair quantities examples of ancient furniture in bronze and stone. Thucydides mentions that concluding a battle of 427 B.C. beds were made of bronze and iron and
dedicated to Hera. However in general, some wood was always used alongside metal...the metal normally being hollow cast and the various components joined together.
From about the time of 3000 BC, most of the
common furniture making techniques we know today were already in use in ancient Egypt; including the mortise and tenon joint, the dowel, carving, as well as tools such as the adze, chisel, saw, awl, and bow drill,
and by 2000 BC, we can also add the dovetail joint, halving joints, and shoulder mitres.
In early ancient times the techniques of wood panelling was developed to overcome the problem of the size of a piece of
wood being dependent on the size of the tree it came from. By panelling, woodworkers were able to make much heftier pieces -- this also helped reduce splitting caused when wood is joined in an
"unnatural" way, a way that restricts the necessary movement occasioned by humidity changes.
The shaping of wood by heat or moisture, known as bentwood, was invented at an unknown time. Ancient Egyptian
stools and tables depicted in paintings give the appearance of having been braced by bentwood and it seems likely that the klismos chair was made with bentwood techniques.
We can turn to evidence given in ancient
texts and tablets for the supposition that metals were used in ancient woodworking at an early era. Ancient cuneiform tablets from circa 1400 BC tell of furniture sent to the king of Babylon as a present by the
king of Egypt as being beds, chairs, and footstools overlaid with gold. Another inscription refers to bedsteads of silver.
At least before 3000 BC the decorative method of veneering, involving the overlaying, and
often gluing, of high grade wood over run of the mill wood, was in use among the ancients! Materials used for ancient veneer included ivory and bone, tortoise shell (used on couches by 100 BC), ebony, and maple.
The Bed of Yuia, an official during the 18th Dynasty, in the Cairo Museum, dated to circa 1400 BC has a 6mm thick veneer. Cicero of ancient Rome was said to have bought a colosally expensive citron table with "the
veins arranged in waving lines to form spirals like small whirlpools".
As we have seen many of the techniques of woodworking and furniture making that we know today were already in use in ancient Egypt by
circa 3000 BC. Over the ensuing centuries in Greek furniture and Roman furniture making, ancient pioneers of woodworking refined and developed these skills further.Today, we woodworkers continue the tradition of
making items of use in everday life from raw wood. The tools may be different, but the requirements of the wood are the same -- only the means of delivery of the tool's purpose has changed. Take a moment on
your next project to imagine your Ancient Egyptian counterpart as a brother in woodworking. We hope our project plans and patterns here at Furniture Designs, Inc. will help you enjoy your woodworking on new levels
while creating furniture. Special thanks to FurnitureStyles.net for the use of their essay on "Ancient Woodworking" tidbits. |
